


Ain't Gonna Study War No More

by exbex



Series: Hawkeye in Wilby [2]
Category: MASH (TV), Wilby Wonderful (2004)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Bullying, Child Abuse, Gen, Sobriety
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-24
Updated: 2011-10-24
Packaged: 2017-10-24 22:15:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/268456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/exbex/pseuds/exbex
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A prequel to On the Subject of Wilby. Hawkeye recalls the week Sandra and Duck left Wilby.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ain't Gonna Study War No More

**Author's Note:**

> There's a little homage here to nos4a2no9's Quiet in Drowning

It should have been raining the week Sandra and Duck left Wilby. Instead the sun shone relentlessly in a cloudless blue sky, and I felt as drained as if I’d spent the week working on top of a scalding roof rather than in comfortable clinic.  
It was coincidence, I’m fairly certain, that they left within three days of each other. Everybody on the island, it seemed, knew why Sandra was bailing, and no seemed to even notice that Duck had left.  
I had more flashbacks tending to them that week than I had in most of my years since the war ended. There I was, in peace-time, in a nice, quiet, sterile exam room, feeling as if I was back in that tent, with bombs going off outside.  
People talked as if Sandra was carrying around a bomb inside of her anyway. But for me it was more like setting a leg on a healthy young soldier. There was something terribly wrong with the situation, with someone so young involved in something that nothing can prepare anyone for. I felt like I was patching her up and sending her out there, crossing my fingers that she would be okay. I tell you, I think she was probably tougher than half the soldiers I tended to in Korea, and at least something good could-would come out of it eventually.  
I didn’t understand why I had nightmares that night. Years of peace time had left me soft, maybe, because the day after next left me feeling like I’d been shelled.  
It was late afternoon when Duck came in, looking for someone to tend to his injuries. I tried all my tricks to get him to talk: threatening, cajoling, and pleading, but all he did was shrug, look away, and say he’d fallen off a roof.  
They were bruises, surface wounds, but I wanted desperately for them to open up, deep abrasions and cuts and tears, so I could scoop out all the bad stuff and stitch him back together.  
It was the first day that I began fantasizing about retirement. At dusk I went out to the Watch, for a few moments of peace before the usual goings on. Usually, the waves and rocks would bring me comfort, knowing that they had been there long before I was and would remain long after I’m gone. That night, they just made me rethink sobriety. War or peace, it doesn’t matter. The same cycles of man’s inhumanity to man, of the indifference that we show to each other, just go round and round until we’re so numb to it that we don’t have the sense to be dizzied, though we repeat, over and over again, never again.  
Katherine took one look at me after I dragged myself into the house and made me sit down with a cup of herbal tea. I don’t particularly like herbal tea, but when I watch her make it, even though, or perhaps because, it’s such a simple gesture, I feel like I can breathe easy.  
“You’re too good for me,” I said. It’s another one of our games, that quickly evolved into something more important. She answered, perfectly and on cue. “Clearly. But we all have our vices.”  
She left me to work it out in the kitchen, taking sips and concentrating on keeping my hands steady. It would be two more days before I would speak about it with her, in the safe and quiet darkness of our bedroom, her hand running through my hair. It was one of the times I was glad we didn’t have children. I was against the idea at first, but she was indifferent. “We have as much chance of bettering the world by bringing children into it as we do of risking the pain of bringing children into a broken world,” she told me. We never officially tried, but we didn’t try to prevent it either. She’s at peace with that, but Katherine finds a way to bring peace to anything. I ain’t gonna study war no more. It was a promise I made to myself after Korea, but the next day I would go back to the clinic and pick up my physician’s tools, and face the world armed.


End file.
